For one thing, Black Tuesday did not come during a presidential election year. We are looking at a disaster that is being magnified by a rare and unhappy confluence of events.
There are a number of things going on here that seem designed to work against any kind of rational behavior. Having a crisis of this magnitude a month before a hotly contested national election would seem an automatic invitation to disaster.
But there are a lot of other ingredients. First of all, almost no one seems to have seen the economic crisis coming.
That may be due in part to a failure of my profession, journalism. Those who are running our major news institutions evidently want you to believe that Matt Damon and Jennifer Aniston and J Lo are the most important people in the world.
They want you to think about their frivolous and inconsequential lives. Trying to make serious sense of our nation’s finances is hard and takes a lot of work. Washington likes to criticize the domestic automakers these days for being so short-sighted, for caring more about the next set of ten-days sales reports than about building the cars needed to stay competitive ten years from now. That’s fair.
Yet the fact is that we’ve been running our economy the same way. Asking the voters to tighten their belts, turn down that dial and invest for the long-term future was politically risky at best.
Borrowing a few trillion more from China to keep the good times rolling was a lot easier. Besides, by the time the bill comes due, the politicians who borrowed the money are likely to be retired.
Well, we’re close to maxing out all our credit cards. The bills are coming due, the banks are tottering, and nobody is exactly sure what to do about it. Suddenly, Congress was told that either they put up immense sums to bail out these imprudent lenders, or the whole financial structure could come crashing down.
That didn’t make much sense to most congressmen, who frankly resented it. Rank-and-file Republicans didn’t see why their constituents should have to bail out the Wall Street plutocrats.
Both Democrats and Republicans smelled an election-year rat and didn’t want to be left holding the bag with the ticking time bomb. So, yesterday, they revolted against the leadership of both parties.
To everyone’s shock, they told those who had built the life raft to shove it. That must have felt good, until the largest one-day stock slide in history. We don’t know what happens next.
We do know that Republicans are ignoring the man they once followed blindly, George W. Bush and his would-be successor, John McCain. Barack Obama seems mysteriously silent.
Oregon’s only Republican congressman, a former broadcaster named Greg Walden, may have put it best.
“We are playing with fire. It’s very, very dangerous,” he said.
We are likely to find out how much so, very soon.
Yes, it is clear, as Mr. Lessenberry suggested, that journalism as a profession has failed miserably of late in reporting economic and financial matters.
So let's look closely at who voted "No" in the Michigan Congressional delegation. Voting no were Democrats Conyers, Kilpatrick and Stupak. Also voting no were Republicans Hoekstra, Knollenberg, McCotter, Miller, Rogers and Walberg.
The reasons that Conyers and Kilpatrick voted no has to be found in the fever-swamp of class warfare that they inhabit, since both of them can hardly be challenged for re-election. They'd both be re-elected, by wide margins, if they died in October.
For the others -- Democrat Stupak and the Republicans who voted no (Dave Camp and Fred Upton voted yes), what we probably see is a group of incumbents who broke ranks with leadership because many of their consituents were so vocally opposed to the bill.
How to address that problem? I can think of one way for a southeast Michigan journalist, especially one connected so publicly to the hallowed University of Michigan, to make a difference. Ask these incumbents' November opponents how they'd have voted. Let's start, for instance, with Joe Knollenberg's MI-9th Congressional District opponent, Gary Peters. One simple, straightforward question: "Mr. Peters, how would you have voted on Monday? Yes, or no. That is all."
There will very likely be another vote, perhaps this week. It is not too late to do that right now, and to demand answers as soon as a replacement bill is crafted and before any of the current delegation has to vote.
That's not so hard, is it?
Posted by: Anonymous | September 30, 2008 at 02:49 PM
So easy, in fact, that the KosFiles website did just that. And thereafter published a statement from Peters' campaign office. Quoth the Peters Campaign:
*****
"This is a tragic example of how badly broken Washington has become under President Bush and Congressman Knollenberg. Instead of working together to pass a commonsense bill that protected homeowners and stabilized the financial system, political infighting created a special-interest laden bill has left middle class families holding the bag.
Given the current structure of the deal, which included bailouts to foreign banks, insufficient reforms or accountability provisions to guarantee that this doesn't happen again, and weak protections against using taxpayer money to fund golden parachutes, I would have voted no."
*****
So, we see that Joe Knollenberg is no more and no less patriotic, smart, dumb, prinicpled or craven on this one issue than is Gary Peters, who would have voted in precisely the same way as did Knollenberg. But it is funny how Gary Peters saw this bill as "special-interest laden, weak and insufficient," but Sander Levin (D-MI) voted for it. Gary Peters must not have heard Nancy Pelosi's pep talk for passage.
So that's one down, that I have already done for Mr. Lessenberry as an example. Now for the rest of the Democratic House challengers... oh, and perhaps just one more question for Mr. Peters; just how is it that executive compensation caused this problem? Are Democrat-millionaires Jim Johson, Frank Raines and Jamie Gorelick among the "golden parachute crowd" after getting their tens of millions from Fannie Mae, under the studious protection of Barney Frank?
Posted by: Anonymous | September 30, 2008 at 04:45 PM
Of course the MSM including Jack have done a lousy job on reporting business news but that is no newsflash this shortcoming has been a fixture in the media in part becuase like many CEO's, teachers,and others they are incompetent...
I have posted many times on the tabloid nature of the media and how the media has destroyed entire communities with it's often racist and trainwreck themes to appease the insular white middle class..
Now of course this white middle class is in a state of crisis and as usual when this bandwidth of people get upset shit changes the problem of course with this usual script is that now the ghost is in the machine and no script or the usual suspects can fix it..
Leadership in our country and in this region is worthless from our governor to our worthless CEO's to McCain and Obama ..
Truth is people like me is what people can rely upon and trust me I will deliver from my TV show the various venues which published my content.I will be here for my country in this time of crisis...
I will continue to make a difference people like Jack and posters like Anonymous(intellectual cowards can never be visible leaders) cannot..
Lesson#1 What to do in times of economic crisis:
Answer: Start and create a inner circle of people and meet once a week to discuss ideas and options to handling this crisis on a micro level, use this group to defuse tensions and find out what works and what does not work with regard to money, finding discounts, etc..
Lesson#2 : I shall return tomorrow..
Posted by: Thrasher | September 30, 2008 at 07:38 PM
Jack, You are brilliant but on your media point you couldn't be more wrong.
http://americanmadness.com/2008/10/01/oh-it-was-the-media-now/
Posted by: Josh Friedlander | October 01, 2008 at 01:29 AM